Updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday ... and maybe other days too.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Miss Easy Tactics! with Justin XV

[Our pedagogical series in which we look at a portion of a game I played recently in which some obvious tactic was overlooked. Readers are invited to practice their skill by seeing if they can spot what was missed.]

Play now proceeded 18...Rfc8 19.Rac1 Be8 20.g4 Nd6 21.Qf3 Nd7 and despite playing 22.Na4? (to which a knight capture on e5 might have been a strong reply) and some worse moves besides, White later went on to win.

But in the above sequence, what did both players miss?

(The game is not given below, being too embarrassingly bad to reproduce in full.)

Ah, OK, you're thinking of the same first move and then alternatives, rather than three different first moves! Yes, indeed, as long as I play 19.Bxf6 then it's party time.

As it happens, I considered the capture on both the next two moves, when it doesn't win! But on the nineteenth move, despite all the pieces being obviously set up for a tactic (mind you, they were here too) I didn't. Because, perhaps, 18.Rc2 doesn't seem to do anything to strengthen White tactically and 18...Rfc8 obviously appears to reinforce Black on the c-file - whereas what it actually does in practice is to put a nice rook on c8 for White to take.

Still, my tactical brain must have been at its dullest that morning anyway: if I tell you that the preceding moves were 16...Nd6-f5, 17.Bf4-g5 Rc8-c7, you can see another piece-winning opportunity sailed past unnoticed, and to my mind one that (perhaps unlike the nineteenth move) shouldn't be significantly harder to find OTB than in a puzzle.